Would you ever exchange and complete on one house but just exchange on the other?

[Sotonwhere]

My title is stupid.

What I mean is:

We all exchange (say chain of 3, Im in the middle) on 1st December

I complete my sale on 15th December

I then complete my onward purchase on 1st Jan

This is because the people buying my flat are pregnant and want to move before baby arrives, whereas the people I'm buying from don't want to move before Xmas as they have people visiting.

This is the situation I'm in - not hypothetical. However the offer on my purchase has onyl just been accepted and I'm viewing somewhere else tomorrow and might go for that instead. Chain status of that unknown.

I'm just wondering how I coudl make it work and the above occurred to me - would it be OK or is that a really stupid thing to do for some reason?

Assuming I had somewhere to stay for the few weeks between selling mine and moving into the onwards one of course...would exchange make it all fairly safe from a cash point of view?

yes, exchanging contracts does seal the deal (or if it does fall through, you get paid lots of money). If I understand this correctly, you complete your sale on the 15th Dec, move out and have your money. You then can't move in to the new place until you complete on that - which won't be 1st Jan of course as it is a bank holiday.

so you'll need to put your stuff into storage and yourself into a hotel or similar - could be a challenge over Xmas but not impossible.

I think it works. You've got boneheaded vendors though, what a silly reason to delay a move!!

if these dates are real, try very hard to get them earlier. Everyone goes to sleep in the last two weeks of December and it is almost impossible to get property transactions done then as rushing about, getting pissed and buying plastic tat is deemed more important.

Yes, its possible. But as above, you will need to pay double removal costs, and storage, as well as have somewhere to live for a few weeks.
Will you be porting your mortgage? Will the mortgage company be OK with the break?

I agree with trying to move everything to well before Christmas. Can't your sellers be happy in new house in Nov ready for guests over Christmas???

Yes perfectly fine to do this, people do. If you don't mind the upheaval of two moves.

OK good to know this isn't ridiculous for some legal reason I haven't heard of.

I agree sellers should get their arses moving but they haven't found their onward purchase yet (chain of 3 was a simplification) so god knows how long that will take. I'm in this position because my original sale fell through, then I got another sale (June). Then I pulled out my purchase in August (irreconcilable differences following detailed discussions after the survey)and have just found somewhere else to buy. So clearly the gods of house moving are against me.

I'm tempted to pull the plug on my buyers and find more since by the time this happens it will have been 6-7 months and we're selling in London so that's probably about 40k of price rise we're missing out on. But that's another conversation, plus I'm not a complete bastard. I just want to get it OVER.

And breathe...

We did it! Sold ours and exchanged on new house in August, went into rented, moved to new house in Jan. Our seller was divorcing and hadn't quite sorted her move, and we needed to the area for schools. All worked fine.

Your vendors havent found a house yet?

I wouldn't advise you to exchange with your buyers and move out unless your vendors exchange with you, with an extended completion. At the moment it's a rising market and you don't want to be without a property, or prices may go up without you having a property to ask more money on. If that makes sense.

if you weren't in insane-town I'd say sell yours and go into rented just to keep it together. But if prices are really going up that fast (????) it may not be a good move.

but if the vendors haven't even found a house yet then you are not going anywhere before 2016. Sorry. With that and their juvenile excuse, my 'you are being pissed about' alarms are going off.

You said the second completion would be 1st Jan - a bank holiday Friday before a weekend. That won't happen.
And the first completion is a Tuesday? Unusual.

To clarify I completely made the dates up to demonstrate the sort of thing I was thinking of. No dates have been discussed yet. I just know the buyers are pregnant and want to move soon but the sellers, who only accepted our offer this afternoon so haven't found their place yet, don't want to move before Xmas.

I was just wondering if something like I proposed above where we all exchange on the same day but complete on different days would work.

So really it's a lot more hypothetical than real at the moment.

I agree with thick and thin. I wouldn't sell a London property unless I was able to exchange on the property I wanted to buy at the same time with a completion date agreed. London is crazy and a few months can mean tens of thousands of pounds difference. You'll get another buyer if these won't hang on and in the meantime prices will most likely rise...crazy as London property is! essentially you would be gifting £40,000 to a complete stranger... Kind as that is I'd hope they were a deserving one!!

Sorry for the confusion.

What I'm trying to ask about is exchanging on the same day but completing on different days about a month apart. We could find somewhere to stay for the month and could cope with moving stuff twice. Might ask our purchase to contribute to the cost since they're diving the timetable.

It would all be locked down due to the exchange so as pp says we'd get a big lump of cash if our purchase collapsed after exchange.

And they only accepted our offer today after a week on the market (outside of London). The estate agent has told us they've missed out on a couple of places they wanted to buy as they're not proceed able without an agreed sale on their place, so no need for the being pissed about alarm yet I hope

even in London, surely places don't go up that much in a month. I think it should work but I also think you will not be in your new place until late Jan at earliest, even if you kick all this off tomorrow.

remember you can't have a 'standard' rental for a month. You'll need a holiday cottage, air bnb or similar.

Excited for you if you've found somewhere. and only a week on the market! Hope it all goes smoothly this time regardless

Been there and got the t shirt.

We desperately wanted out of our old house (too too small) exchanged with our buyer on say 1st to complete 1 week later on 8th but it was right at the end of the day so couldn't exchange with the one we were buying until the next day.

Exchanged on the one we were buying on 2nd but they wanted a month to find a rental property so completion was set for 31st. We moved into a hotel room for 3 weeks.

All our stuff went into storage, paid 2 lots of removals, 4 of us lived in a hotel room (DCs were 6 and 3 year old) packed a suitcase like a 2 week holiday. Used my absolutely lovely friends washing machine and tumble drier, was fed a few times by different people.

Would I do it again? Yes, to get the house I love.

Meant to say, we ported the mortgage as we needed to complete within 6 months and we did it in 3 weeks. Cost of the hotel and food was a fair whack of money but yes, totally worth it.